


No right to love you

by PredatoryFlamingo



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 17:15:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21323788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PredatoryFlamingo/pseuds/PredatoryFlamingo
Summary: This is a small piece about Stephen Strange dealing with the outcome of Endgame and Tony's death. In all the different realities he viewed/lived through to find the one where they win, he also saw a lot of realities where he and Tony were more than just friends. Which made losing him even more unbearable to Stephen. He is blaming himself for Tony's death and is desperately trying to come to terms with having lost a life and love he never really had. He seems to be at the end of his strength, when Pepper comes to his aid and provides an unexpected way for Stephen to endure his pain, if not get over it.It's pretty depressing in the beginning but there's sort of a happy end. Maybe I should call it an okay end, since Tony will not come back to life. It has a fluffy ending, tough don't worry, there's NO romance, just the beginning of a deep friendship between Stephen and Pepper.Enjoy! :)
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Tony Stark/Stephen Strange
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	No right to love you

**Author's Note:**

> As always I was inspired by a specific song to write this: "No right to love you" (acoustic version) by Rhys Lewis  
Feel free to listen to it as you read ;)
> 
> And as I mentioned in the summary, the relationship between Stephen and Pepper is not at all supposed to be romantic. Just two people comforting each other through hardship and pain and forming a friendship because of it.
> 
> Thanks for reading and enjoy! :)

Stephen’s eyes were open even though he had been lying on his bed for nearly three hours. Dried tears felt flaky against his cheeks, he didn’t have any left. So instead he just stared up into nothingness, letting the familiar pictures pass in front of his inner mind’s eyes. Tony. Always Tony. Tony lying in the dirt, burnt, hurting, unable to move or really speak. Tony surrounded by friends and loved ones watching in stunned silence or sobbing quietly. Tony briefly meeting his own eyes and blinking slowly in understanding and…and possibly forgiveness. Tony, who had always been the better man. Tony…who was gone now.

Taking a shuddering breath, Stephen rolled over to his side and sat up on the bed. It was no use, sleep wouldn’t be coming for him tonight, just as it had avoided him so many nights since the fight. Sighing deeply, he stood up, slipped on his sling ring and slowly but surely proceeded to make the required hand movements to open up a portal. Stepping through, he could already see the grey stone illuminated by the yellow light of the portal.

‘Anthony Edward Stark’

As soon as he took another step forward, his magic dissipated and for a short while he was left in darkness. He was glad for it. After all, he was only wearing a pair of pyjama pants and was standing around in a graveyard. No need for people to see and start talking. Gradually his eyes adjusted to the night and the sparse moonlight coming from the sky let him see again. He reached out a quivering hand and lightly touched the top of the stone, closing his eyes for a moment. He took a deep breath and started forcing out the words that were crushing his soul. 

“I have no right to miss you when I chose to let you go. When I was the one who knew. I knew. And I made you do it anyway. I saw you, saw us…together…so many different realities and in so many of them we were…”

He cleared his throat. His voice was shaking as bad as his hands.

“I’m sorry. I wish I had seen another way. Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe…maybe…I should’ve just left things the way they were. Then you’d still be alive, happy with your wife and your daughter wouldn’t have to grow up without you. I’m so sorry.”

He swallowed hard, almost choking on the next few words.

“I have no right to love you. But I do. I still do.”

He hung his head and now the sobs came back, vicious, ugly sobs that were hardly leaving him any air to breathe. He stayed like this, leaning on the gravestone of his friend, the man that he had doomed, until he felt like all of his strength had left him and his knees gave out under him…and he let himself fall to the ground, his knees hitting the wet grass and his hand sliding down the gravestone. He covered his face with his hands, shaking violently.

It began with a low growl that made its way up and out of his throat, growing into a pained rasp.

“I just…”, he forced the words past his clenched lips, “…I don’t know what to do now. With all that knowledge of what you could’ve…what we could’ve… How do I go on? How do people just…move on? I can’t….I just can’t.”

Still shaking, Stephen wiped at his eyes and let his hands sink down to the ground, almost falling forward and leaning his forehead against the cold of the lifeless stone.

“I saw you love me a million times. Without question or judgement or fear. And I saw me…happy…just being loved by you. And I saw you die a million times, in my arms, in Peter’s, alone, in pain…you were always so furious about our loss. But I could see the desperation, your despair every time…because you couldn’t save everyone. I felt your loss as my loved one so often. I don’t think I can ever recover from that Tony! Why, why did you have to love me? It would be so much easier just to grieve you as a colleague, even as a friend but this? How am I supposed to cope with this?!”

He was panting now, breathing loudly as if he’d just run a mile. “FUCK!” He punched the stone in front of him. It didn’t budge but his already weak and sore hand felt the impact painfully. He sucked in a breath, his eyes watering from the pain now and his teeth gritted against the pulsing in his knuckles. It took him a few moments to breathe through the pain before he spoke again, this time in an almost inaudible whisper, his last resolve leaving him.

“I miss you so much…so much…it feels like it should kill me. But it doesn’t. I wish it would.”  
“Instead it just breaks me. Over and over and over and there’s nothing left of me but the pain.”  
“I have no right to love you. I have no right to miss you. I still do.”  
“Please…just make it stop, please. It hurts so bad. Please help me, I don’t know what to do.”

“I need you, Tones…”

That last word stopped his ramblings. That last word was scorching hot iron in his stomach. That last word broke him even more. 

So he just sat there, unable to move or speak or do anything to find relief from the pain he was drowning in.

He didn’t know how long it had been but the moonlight around him seemed to be changing into something lighter, maybe the first signs of dawn. That was when she found him. Pepper. Of course she would find him here at some point. He’d been coming here every night for weeks. Of course she would be suffering worse than he was. Though, at the moment, he couldn’t imagine how that should be possible.

He hadn’t heard her approach in his stupor bur when a small hand lightly touched his back, he had shot up from where he had been crouching down in shock and fear.

“It’s just me”, she said in a soft voice.  
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you”, she added, raising her hands up in the air where he could see them.

In the sparse light of the breaking day he could only guess at her expression but his rapid breathing started to calm down when he saw that there was no danger.

“I…I know you’ve been coming here for a while now, I see you sometimes when I look outside the window at night.”  
“It’s okay, visiting him helps me, too!”, she added quickly as if she feared she had made him feel unwelcome.

He huffed at that. “Pepper, I…” His voice broke, his throat felt sore from all the crying and sobbing.  
Clearing his throat, he stepped away from the gravestone and stood next to her, looking down.

“I…heard you. Just a few times. I didn’t mean to, of course…but I was on my way here and heard you and didn’t wanna make you uncomfortable, so I just kinda…stayed back and waited, I guess...”  
She broke off and took a deep breath. Then something Stephen had not expected happened. She took his shaking right hand in her left and squeezed it softly, carefully.  
“I…I heard you talk about what you saw in the other possible realities or futures or whatever they are. It…must’ve been agonizing. To see all of it, lose everyone…lose him. Again and again.”

Her voice grew shaky at her last words.

“I can’t imagine it. I don’t know how you’re still sane. I lost him once and I think Morgan is the only thing keeping me from falling apart right now. You…”

She turned towards him and grasped his other hand in her right, holding on to him as if she was scared he would vanish if she let go. He didn’t fight her. All he felt he could do was stare at her with tears in his eyes and feeling…feeling his pain reflected in hers. It was oddly comforting and devastating at the same time. He didn’t want anyone else to feel the way he did. Her next words pulled him out of his dark thoughts.

“Oh Stephen. You had to lose him so many times and without ever getting to tell him what you really saw. I don’t know why this reality is different, I don’t know why he chose me in this one and not you. But I know that you’re probably the person who understands best how I feel right now and…and how much it hurts. Peter…of course Peter is devastated. I know that. Tony was like a father for him. But I was…I was his partner. I’m the mother of his child, I’m the one he came to with his nightmares and his pain, I’m the one that loves him still, still so much and it hurts so, so bad. Maybe you feel it even more than I do. Maybe you were the same to him in all those other realities and maybe you know exactly how I feel. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do either, but I know that you’re not alone.”

Her last words were accompanied by a pained expression and an even tighter squeeze of his hands. It felt like she desperately wanted him to understand her, to feel her complete honesty and openness. She was exposing herself to him, so he could find a way in, as if she was trying to pull him out of himself to feel with her what she was struggling to put into words. He felt his defenses crumble. He could not shut her out, not her. He could not leave her alone here, in her pain, in this mess that he had caused.

“It breaks me, too”, she whispered under her breath, as if she had been reading his thoughts.

“Every day it tears me apart a little bit more and every day I live despite of it. We both do. But we don’t have to do it alone, Stephen! I’m still here. So are Peter and Morgan, thanks to you and Tony. And all the others. You’re not alone and I refuse to just keep watching you do this to yourself. Blaming yourself.”

She broke of, tears now spilling down her cheeks, that desperation for him to understand still written on her face. His heart throbbed painfully against his ribs, his lips trembled with the effort of clenching his jaws shut.

“Let me help, share this with me, let me be here with you”, she said in a pleading voice, a sob rippling through her.

How could he deny her? Her, of all people. Her, of all people Tony had loved. She was right. Her pain was the closest to his own, her feelings mirroring his. He could not bear to leave her. Tony would want to know that someone would be watching over her, making sure she wasn’t alone, making sure she wasn’t lost. Like he was. Maybe…maybe he could come back. For her. For him. Not for himself but for his friends’ partner, his lovers lover. Maybe…

“I will. I’ll stay.”

He pulled her into a tight hug and tried to put all of his emotions into it. Everything he didn’t know how to say. He held onto her like she was his anchor to sanity, held her through her crying and her sobbing. And she held him back. 

They stood like this for a long time until Pepper was able to calm down and he was able to exist again without her grounding him. They didn’t speak at all but she pulled his hand back into hers and led him back to her house. Their house. She kneeled before the fireplace, rekindled the flames and stood up again, sighing deeply. Seeing him shiver from both the cold and the exertion that comes with prolonged crying, she looked around her. Grabbing a blanket of the nearest chair, she pulled him down on the sofa with her and threw the blanket over both of them, leaning her head on his shoulder. He let it happen, glad for the warmth and also the comfort of another human being.

‘I can do this’, he thought. ‘I can be here. For her.’

“I remember”, she began, “when Tony met you for the first time and came home seething at ‘That Wizard’…and he just went on rambling about how arrogant you were, I believe he called you Harry Potter multiple times.”

“That’s when I knew I was in trouble”, she added with a wistful smile and he had to actually suppress the twitch of his lips. “Anyone who could rile him up like this meant trouble. He was always into people that could hold their own against his snarkiness.”

She chuckled weakly as he turned his head towards her and his raised eyebrows. “I suppose the sarcasm is what did it for him. You almost rival me in that, you know”, she said proudly, poking his chest with her index finger. Stephen couldn’t help but smile at that, shaking his head and then laying it against the back of the sofa.

“That I don’t doubt, although you must be much more patient than I am. I don’t know how you put up with his antics. He could drive me up the walls with his stubborn carelessness. In one reality I viewed he actually punched me when I didn’t approve of his plan. Punched me! The audacity…”

Stephen stopped himself then, fearing he might have revealed too much. Was he making her uncomfortable talking about other possible realities?

However, she placated his fears by letting out a barking ‘ha!’ and nestling into his side again.

“You think it was easy? I could tell you about a hundred times Tony Stark made me lose it, and those are just examples. Though I suppose it’s inappropriate to talk about him in that way now…”

She grew silent after that, lost in thoughts of her lost love. He didn’t want her to drift under like he usually did. He knew it would help her to talk about Tony, she shouldn’t have to be afraid to talk about their shared life. Especially not in front of him. He might have lost everything but she still had Morgan and he would do anything to ensure she would be able to give all the love to that little girl that Tony couldn’t give himself anymore. He would make sure she was okay. He would stay, for Tony. And to keep his family safe. Even though he had failed Tony in everything else, this was the one thing he could do for him.

So he sighed and said the only thing that would come to his mind.

“Why don’t you tell me more about some of those? He always loved to be the center of attention. You’d be doing him a favour, really. Also, there’s so much I really don’t know about him. I think it would make me feel a bit better to get to know him through you. Will you indulge me?”

She seemed to be thinking about it for a few moments but, coming to a decision, she sat up a little straighter next to him, linking his arm with hers. “Of course, Stephen. You deserve to know everything I can tell you about him. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Chuckling, he used his free hand to pet her arm.

“Alright, consider me warned. Now, what was the worst thing he ever did to make you lose it?”

The morning was spent in relaxed conversation, occasional smiles and even laughter - and many stories about Tony Stark. When Morgan awoke and sleepily toddled down the stairs, wiping her eyes and yawning, they made room for her between them on the sofa. Cuddling up to her mother under the blanket, she looked at Stephen with big eyes. 

“Daddy’s Wizard?”, she asked curiously.

Stephen stared at her for a moment, stunned, before nodding his head softly.


End file.
